Month: September 2017

Book lovers! *Fanfare noise* I now announce the start of my 52 week book challenge

First some background

There’s a period of my life I hate, one I wish I could delete forever, when it was over I got rid of as much of the things from it as possible. I sold everything or just gave it away, I wanted nothing left of it that didn’t have to be left. That included most of my books. My life is now perfect, I’ve got everything anyone could ever dream of and so I’ve started to rebuild my library.

I love reading, always have, on a holiday with nothing but time I used to read 5 to 10 books happily now I can’t finish a book a month, my attention span shot from social media and streaming services. I’ve bought all of these books and I never seem to read them so I’m setting myself a challenge.

I’ve chosen 34 books to read in 52 weeks. Hopefully this should work out to almost a whole book a week. Some books will take two weeks, no way I’m finishing Sapiens in a single week, some will take a couple of days, Cat’s Cradle I’m looking at you, so in the end it’ll even out.

The 34 books I’ve chosen are:

The Red Queen by Matt Ridley
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
This is a Call by Paul Brannigan
Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
How I escaped my certain fate by Stewart Lee
The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie
My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin
Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson
Chasing the scream by Johann Hari
Reasons to stay alive by Matt Haig
Non-Fiction by Chuck Palahniuk
David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell
Fear and loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Lost in the funhouse by Bill Zehme
Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley
Silent Bob Speaks by Kevin Smith
The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford
The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan
Originals by Adam Grant
Globalization and it’s discontents by Joseph Stiglitz
Nudge by Thaler and Substring
The Tiger that Isn’t by Michael Blastland
Power by Naomi Alderman
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
A closed and common orbit by Becky Chambers
The Humans by Matt Haig
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

I’ve always believed that reading widely and frequently makes you a much better person more capable of dealing with the world we live in, I’m hoping that this challenge will make me feel as good about my mind as I now do about my body.

There’s a couple of rules I’m going to stick to with it

1. If a book is rubbish I’ll stop reading it and sub in another one, no point in wasting time with shit books

2. No starting new books until I’ve finished the current one

3. Post a review of every book

So this is the start of it, some of the books have been bought for me, some I started and forgot to finish, some I found in charity shops with hand written notes in the margin, one is the sequel to an audiobook a lovely comedian bought me and some are brand new, inspired by things other people are reading.

If you want to tell me some of these are rubbish before I get to them do so and I can get rid of them before I waste a week on them.

If you want to join in with me that’d be fantastic

First book is Power by Naomi Alderman, already done three chapters and hooked.

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